By Any Other Name

Pity taxonomy. When it is not being mistaken for the craft of making
dead things look alive, the science of naming things seems, in this
age of scientific razzle-dazzle, hopelessly old-fashioned.

And yet the act of naming is, in many ways, the fundamental task of
our intellect. The world, as William James suggested, appears
"a blooming, buzzing confusion." As scientists, our
ability to parse that confusion—to group objects into
meaningful categories and give those categories names—is both
the prerequisite to and the culmination of our understanding of the
world. The way we name things, however, inevitably affects how we
perceive those things.

Nowhere is the importance of naming more obvious than in the ways we
describe breast cancer, a disease that evokes faint anxiety every
time its name is uttered. Descriptions of this disease go back 3,000
years; over the past 30 years, it has become one of the most
intensively studied diseases, not to mention the focus of
promotional and educational campaigns. Yet despite this long history
and our relentless scrutiny, we are not yet sure what "breast
cancer" is, or even whether it is a single disease. The more we
learn of this condition and its underlying mechanisms, the more
complex and multifaceted this disease appears: We are making
progress in our understanding of this disease, but sometimes the
very name impedes us.